May 2010 Warhammer Producer's Letter

The following letter was taken from the Warhammer Online Newsletter - May 2010. Carrie Gouskos addresses the Warhammer community Post Patch 1.3.5

Hello everyone,

Welcome to the first Producer’s Letter in a post-1.3.5 universe! I hope everyone is enjoying the version and the new city changes as much as we are. While you get your city on, I want to take a minute to thank all the players who came out and supported the Public Testing in the past month. We held 14 different public test events--from the exclusive guild closed tests to the stability test, to the European and North American open tests. At each test we had Mythic and GOA employees, participating, taking notes, and gathering feedback. And from that player feedback, we have put weeks of polish, tweaks, features, and fixes into the cities.

We even take internal feedback very seriously. Coder Chris White apologizes to Producer James Casey for lifelining his Archmage into certain death vs. T’char Zanek.

Communication is very important to us. Though there are many different outlets through which we like to communicate, the producer’s letter is the one in which I hope to give you the best insight into what we’re thinking about in the short term for Warhammer. While it’s important to me that we follow through on everything mentioned in these letters, it’s equally important that we’re not negatively impacting the player experience by doing so. Because of this, we gauge player reaction through many outlets to make sure that our vision for the game aligns with community sentiment. In the last producer’s letter I told everyone that we would be allowing players to play both realms on the same server. There were reasons for this decision, however community sentiment about the impact this would have on Realm pride was, to be blunt, mixed. As a result of this mixed community reaction we have reevaluated our decision. The intent behind this feature moving forward is to only allow the option to play both Realms in the case where there is only one server to choose from. In smaller language markets our only option up until this point has been to merge them with other markets of different languages, or allow them to play on one server but force them to choose which realm they prefer playing. This feature allows us to achieve our goal of offering the best possible gameplay experience for all markets.

Alright, enough with the heavy stuff. I’m very pleased to announce that we will be implementing a solution to the armor set changes in 1.3.6! You may recall, many months ago, we posted comparison screenshots of new armor sets that we wanted to introduce. You can see them here, here, and here:

The reaction from the players was again, mixed. We were faced with a real dilemma, introduce the new armor art and make some players unhappy, or not introduce them and let the good work the artists had done, fixing bugs, fixing tint issues, and generally improving the armor progression cadence, go to waste.

Unfortunately, the solution to find some way to introduce both systems simultaneously and let people pick would have taken an extraordinary amount of work and maintenance and is not something we considered as an option. So we’ve waited until the right time to introduce a new system that will accomplish what we think will satisfy both camps, as well as give you limitless other options.

Our solution is to introduce a new system that will let you set your armor and weapon appearance independently of your armor stats, so that you can look how you want to look and yet keep the statistics that you personally prefer. The goal is to give players the added benefit of having the new armor sets available to them, but the ability to change their appearance if they don’t like the way they look. We also think this will introduce a level of customization that players want to have for their characters. We will share more details around this system and the mechanics of how it works as we get closer to 1.3.6.

Finally, I wanted to give a brief mention to some of the career changes that we are investigating for 1.3.6. The Runepriest and Zealot careers are receiving a change to the Harbinger/Rune mechanics, best articulated by our very own Combat and Career’s Designer Steven “The Balance-a-nator” Engle:
Hi, I am Steven Engle. At this point in the Producer’s letter you have probably read about blah and maybe something about blah. Don’t worry; I skipped over those sections as well. If this blurb happens to end up in the letter; then I will parade around work saying, “That’ll do Pig, that’ll do”.

In patch 1.3.6, we want to make further improvements upon the Zealot and Runepriest careers. We wanted to give options to the healers that train a mastery path for a delivery method rather than a playstyle.

When thinking of changes, we kept coming back to one thing: “HARBINGER OF DOOM” (BIG FOR EFFECT). I can already tell the Zealots are cringing and thinking, “What is that crazy person doing to my Harbinger?” The meat of the change is that Harbinger of Doom becomes an active toggle. You start in “healing mode” by default and by activating the toggle you switch to “damage mode”. This will allow Zealots to pick a Mastery path for the type of abilities that they want, without being forced to then pick again between damage and healing. While the actual effect of the toggle is still being discussed, we are leaning towards flipping magic to healing and vice versa to achieve this goal. Some of you are probably saying, “What about Runepriests? I didn’t hear him say anything about Runepriest!” The plan is to mirror this ability on the Runepriest career as well.

Now before everyone gets all excited, no, this is not the extent of the changes we’ll be implementing in 1.3.6. Be sure to watch the forums for “In Development” posts about other new features coming in the next version. Here’s a hint: We want to make sure that you have proper incentive to wear that shiny new armor that you’re winning in the new city. And even though I said finally before, I just wanted to mention one more thing about the Player Submitted Loading Screen Tooltips. Actually, how about I let the bloggers tell you all about it. Here’s the very special announcement from our WAR Bloggers!

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